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A Comparison Between Newgate Prison As Described in Contemporary Images and in Daniel Defo

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A Comparison Between Newgate Prison As Described in Contemporary Images and in Daniel Defo CORPORAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL PUNISHMENT? A COMPARISON BETWEEN NEWGATE PRISON AS DESCRIBED IN CONTEMPORARY IMAGES AND IN DANIEL DEFOE’S MOLL FLANDERS AND JEREMY BENTHAM’S MODEL FOR THE PANOPTICON Maria-Gloria Simpson Abstract: This article deals with the effects that the material shape of a prison and its system of punishment may have on offenders and touches on the role that art can play within a given society by denouncing or highlighting inhumane or corrupt procedures, thus putting in motion social and political reforms. As a case study Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon will be compared with Newgate Prison, as described in images of the period and in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, with a view to examining its potential implications for prisoners as a result of an increased institutional exercise of power and control. Although never built as a prison in England, over time the Panopticon offered an architectural blueprint for other institutional buildings such as hospitals, schools, factories and asylums in Britain and abroad. The choice of artefacts for this article was suggested by the perceived role that visual and narrative works played in eighteenth-century England as a propelling force for the reform of the penitentiary. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, it could be argued that reciprocal influences were engendered whereby the realistic descriptions of prisons in artworks awoke a social consciousness of the need for penal reforms which, in turn, fed the public taste for further works portraying crime and punishment. In his book, Imagining the Penitentiary, Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, John Bender perceptively defines the influence that the novel had on prison reform: ‘Eighteenth-century prison reform found its form in the sphere of novelistic discourse, where, through the material of language, an emergent structure of feeling took shape and, like an image floating into focus, became subject to conscious experience.’1 In the eighteenth century, interest in crime was rife and the public enjoyed reading stories about villains and participating in the ‘show’ of capital or corporal punishment as if it were indeed a spectacle (Figure 1). Perhaps the gruesome experience had a cathartic effect similar to that of Greek tragedies, as the vision of pain and the engendering of fear have often had a purgative result on man’s negative instincts. Thus the punishment inflicted and publicly witnessed might have had the effect of curbing further criminal intents by operating as a form of social and moral control. 1 J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press Ltd., 1987), 1. 112 VIDES 2014 Fig. 1 - An execution scene outside Debtors’ door at Newgate Author unknown, early years of the nineteenth century http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/summer11/prison.cfm Corporal punishment was central to the spectacle of execution or mutilation, but gradually physical chastisement was substituted by punishment of a different nature, determined through a tighter juridical system and administered by way of the institutionalised prison, initially put in motion by the Penitentiary Parliamentary Act of 1779.2 Bentham’s Panopticon,3 an architectural and ideological concept for the surveillance of prisoners, was an important proposal toward the new philosophy of chastisement. In the panoptical prison inmates would be subjected to the authority and control of their jailers, with a view to their potential redemption and eventual rehabilitation into society as dictated by growing evangelical and philanthropic attitudes to crime and punishment. Despite the gradual shift away from corporal punishment, the appeal of crime fiction continued and had the result of keeping alive public interest in offenders and confinement. This interest grew into a serious commitment and dedicated agenda on the part of legal and social reformers and philanthropists such as Elizabeth Fry, John Howard, Sir Samuel Romilly4, Sir John and Henry Fielding,5 and Jeremy Bentham to name but a few. Jeremy Bentham, creator of the Panopticon, was a philosopher and the founder of Utilitarianism and his interest in penal reforms was more pragmatic than philanthropic. He believed that ‘fictions might be identified, mastered, and turned to socially useful ends’6 a concept that supports the view that the confines between reality and fantasy can become blurred and intertwined hence a novel can often be perceived as reality. A comparison between an architectural plan of Newgate Prison published in 1800 (Figure 2) and Bentham’s planned model for the Panopticon of 1791 (Figure 3) offers the opportunity to examine historical material conditions of detention in England in the early nineteenth century and to evaluate the proposed new penitentiary-house. Newgate Prison stood at the corner of Newgate Street and the Old Bailey in the City of London, and served as a 2 The Penitentiary Act of 1779 was drafted by John Howard and William Blackstone and offered a prison sentence as an alternative to the death penalty or transportation. 3 The name Panopticon from the Greek pan meaning “all” and opticon meaning “to observe” is a round shaped architectural structure with an inspection tower placed in the middle from which a continuous surveillance of prisoners can be exercised. 4 He was influential in the abolishment of the death penalty for theft and minor offences. 5 Henry and John Fielding are usually considered the founders of the Metropolitan Police, an institution that would be sanctioned by Parliament only in 1829. Information derived from J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, 1987, 145. 6 J. Bender, ibid, 37. Maria-Gloria Simpson 113 custodial house for over 700 years from 1188 to 1902.7 Prior to the penitentiary reform, however, prisons were not institutionalised but were privately run on fees exacted from the prisoners and minimal charitable contributions and were rather like secure staging posts, or as John Bender defines them, ‘liminal’8 houses where offenders were safely kept while awaiting judgement. Cases against felons were brought by the victims of crime and the sentence envisaged was capital punishment, transportation or a declaration of innocence, but, as Elizabeth Fry wrote, in the early nineteenth century: ‘Crimes of almost all grades and descriptions were […] punishable with death’.9 Even when acquitted by the magistrate, an innocent inmate would not necessarily be released from Newgate, but could be kept indefinitely if unable to pay the fee expected by the prison keeper for his/her deliverance.10 This situation was confirmed by John Howard, ex- Sheriff of the County of Bedford turned penal reformer, when he visited prisons in England to acquaint himself with their conditions.11 Not only did he find the jails that he inspected in a poor state, but he also discovered that prison keepers were extremely corrupt and often ran illegal ‘tap-houses’ and operated a system of bribes paid by the inmates for better room, board and services.12 In fact, the level of freedom and quality of accommodation and food at Newgate varied in relation to how much the inmates could afford or were prepared to pay for their keep. Inmates with money could be lodged in bailiffs’ houses aptly defined ‘spunging houses’,13 but poor inmates suffered the most abject conditions in squalid, unhealthy cells or dungeons prey to jail fever and with no bedding or heat and with very scanty food. The drawing of Newgate Prison in Figure 2 shows a rectangular façade with two lateral wings. The legend included on the drawing specifies how the building was used for the detention of felons of both sexes, but also of debtors, which means that Newgate did not distinguish between prisoners based on their level of offence. The distribution of space in the plan indicates that felons and debtors were housed in different quadrangles, as were male and female felons, but suggests that the same quadrangle was dedicated to debtors of both sexes (often accompanied by their families), from which one can infer that a degree of sociability and communication could be maintained among the inmates. Condemned felons, however, were always kept in isolated, dingy cells. From the available image, one can surmise that the heavily rusticated building by George Dance the Younger (1780-3) was reminiscent of Giulio Romano’s Mannerist work and had Palladian echoes in its design. Its heavy masses betrayed the function for which it had been destined, thus answering the vision of an ‘architecture parlante’,14 and its 7 In 1780 Newgate was burnt down by the Gordon rioters, but was rebuilt on the same plan. Information derived from John Howard, The state of the prisons in England and Wales, with preliminary observations, and an account of some foreign prisons and hospitals, (London: Johnson, C. Dilly and T. Cadell, MDCCXCII [1792]), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, University of Oxford, Sections I, II, III and VII (221-255). 8 J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, 1987, 64. 9 E. Fry, Gurney, Memoir of the life of Elizabeth Fry: with extracts from her journal and letters, edited by two of her daughters, Vol. 1, London,1847, The Making of Modern Law, Gale 2013, Cengage Learning,303: http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2141/servlet/MOML?af=RN&ae=F3701314057&srchp=a&ste=14, [accessed on 21 November 2013]. 10 O. Sherwin, ‘A Pilgrim's Progress: John Howard and His Famous Book’, The American Journal of Economic and Sociology, Inc., Vol. 4, No. 2, January 1945, 245: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3483411, [accessed on 10 December, 2013]. 11 J. Howard, The state of the prisons in England and Wales, with preliminary observations, and an account of some foreign prisons and hospitals ,1792, 221-255 12 J.
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